Many people might think Ruston isn’t the kind of a big city where you’d expect a big-time airline pilot with nearly 28,000 flight hours to live.

They’d be wrong.

Gene Thornton, a Ruston resident since 1980, is just such a retired pilot who’s come a long way since growing up as a the son of an Oklahoma oilfield worker during the Depression Era.
Thornton, 87, has been retired since 1984. But he has a lifetime’s worth of stories dealing with his love of aviation.